Hell is Other People, or Why We Talk

[Bucky]

I love the Jane Goodall documentary about the Chimpanzees of Gombe. I was particularly fascinated by the way victorious alpha males would comfort the beta males they'd just finished dominating into submission--hugging them, grooming them, cupping their genitals. Of course, humans are a lot like that, although I personally could do without having my boss cup my genitals. But after some conflict within my tribe du jour--be it church or work or social group or family get togethers--it's always helpful if there's some behavior, spontaneous or ritualized, to help smooth over feelings.

The central bonding ritual among the chimps was grooming. Out in the jungle a full EdAsner of back hair is highly susceptible to acquiring gnats and other microvermin. One way the chimps display their love and acceptance of one another is to spend hours picking the bugs off one anothers' backs and eating them (yay protein!), alphas generally going first. When someone eats the bugs right off your back, you know you're loved and protected; you can feel it in very concrete terms.

Now being in a group constantly inclines animals, particularly smart, territorial, opinionated animals like primates. The grooming is absolutely vital to maintaining community cohesion.

Jump forward a few gazillion years. Anthropologists theorize that the development of language among earlier models of mankind came about as a substitute for picking gnats. For environmental reasons, humans assumed increasingly upright postures. Either they had to see each other over tall grasses or needed to spread out more to surround their prey or whatever. The point is, they spent less time in arm's reach of one another. Their interactions became smarter and thus more complex and thus more inclined to misunderstanding and conflict.

Thus the acquisition of language, according to this theory, became necessary as a direct substitute for eating the fleas off each others' backs. Spoken communication can bond us without being so yucky. This is why spoken language is so dependent on ritual: the point often isn't communication of ideas so much as the communication of another tribe member's mere presence.

Those nonverbal rituals still do the job better, I think. Verbal interactions too easily degenerate from gnat-picking to nit-picking. Maybe this is why the internat, I mean internet, is so full of miscommunication. Sure I called you a nazi, but what I really meant to say is I love you.

[WingDinger]

1. How you DOOOOOOOOOIN' ? Fine, thankyou. Howz the weather?

[Fire Walk With Me]

2. "Language is a virus from outer space."

[MrScorpio]

3. Sartre and Chimps are...

What makes this planet so great a place to live.

[Odin2005]

4. I HATE small talk.

It is a big thing that I, as an autistic person, struggle with greatly.

[lunatica]

5. Communication by using language is only a small part of communication

Two people can basically understand each other very well with no spoken language because people communicate with their entire body. They use every part of their faces from smiles, bared teeth, wrinkled noses, rolling eyes, to arching eyebrows and they use their hands and body language without even being aware of it. The tone of their voices is also vital.

None of that happens on the internet and I think it creates problems. I like to show my mood through gifs and it helps because evidently visual cues are pretty important to us when we interact.

I wish gnat picking were something we humans still did. It would help so much.

[rrneck]

6. It seems to me that language is the result of a therory of mind.

The more we remember and plan, the more we rely on symbols to manage all that information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Theory of mind is a theory insofar as the mind is not directly observable.<2> The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only prove the existence of his or her own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another. It is typically assumed that others have minds by analogy with one's own, and based on the reciprocal nature of social interaction, as observed in joint attention,<3> the functional use of language,<4> and understanding of others' emotions and actions.<5> Having a theory of mind allows one to attribute thoughts, desires, and intentions to others, to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. As originally defined, it enables one to understand that mental states can be the cause of—and thus be used to explain and predict—others’ behavior.<6> Being able to attribute mental states to others and understanding them as causes of behavior implies, in part, that one must be able to conceive of the mind as a “generator of representations”

[Bucky]

7. Could be. But there's a lot of animals with minds that still don't have language.

Whales & dolphins, for instance, communicate ideas with a combination of sounds & vibrations along with sonar-detected body positioning. The theory of words being a spin-off of grooming behavior comes from a professor of psychology named Robin Dunbar, who puts an anthropological spin on his theories. Here's a review of his book on the subject.

[rrneck]

8. Thanks! On the Amazon list now. nt

[saras]

9. Why 'why'?

My own opinion is that humans who are more like chimps compare human behavior to chimp behavior a lot. Humans who are more like bonobos compare human behavior to bonobo behavior a lot. And progressives, who often look to human idealism for comparisons, well... that's why I'm a progressive.

I don't see any reason to jump to such simplistic conclusions from so little data myself, (i.e. the theory that the evolution of a behavior as complex as language had one simple, identifiable cause).

Language contributes to pretty much every behavior of a social animal. How do you decide which one behavior is the REAL reason? It's as easy, and as sensible, as deciding which single conspiracy theory explains all of human politics.

[foxfeet]

10. Well, I wouldn't eat the gnats off of your back but I would

use your genitals to play hacky-sack. :P

[Sky Masterson]

11. Actually, hell is other people.....

This reminded me of an old article
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2006/08/16/fewer_friends

Actually, hell is other people
A new study says Americans have fewer friends than ever -- but what if we're enjoying more solitude and intimacy?
By Lisa Selin Davis


Earlier this summer, I spent a week vacationing with some of my oldest and dearest friends, suffering most of the time from paranoia after one of them pronounced me "addicted to worrying" and another accused me of being relentlessly negative (I responded to her T-shirt, printed with the question "What Would Nature Do?" by asserting that nature is a whole lot more violent than Jesus). I resented being known so thoroughly and longed to be surrounded by intimacy lite: acquaintances and cocktail party banter buddies from whom I'm distant enough to ensure a conflict-free interaction, as opposed to friends who have compiled empirical evidence about my character defects over the years.

While I was busy questioning the benefits of intimacy, three sociologists from Duke and the University of Arizona were releasing a study called "Social Isolation in America." The researchers found that Americans have one-third as many close friends as they did 20 years ago, and nearly three times as many said they don't have a single confidante. This, by the way, is how close friends are defined in the study: people with whom one discusses important matters, though one person listed "getting a haircut" as an important matter. I count myself lucky to have more than the study's average number of friends and confidantes. In fact, I am a serial confessor and discuss important matters with anyone who'll listen; by the haircut standard, my postman Ronnie is a close friend. But like many other Americans these days, I find close friendships maddening and admit to the occasional onset of good old-fashioned misanthropy, a subscription to Sartre's observation that hell is other people.

The study, a random sampling of 1,467 adults, sparked a short-lived whirlwind of media activity examining the crisis in American camaraderie, pointing the finger at sprawl and technology and work to explain it. But when I went out searching for the friendless, I found that overwhelmingly they blamed no one but themselves. They are what I'd call voluntarily lonely. Some people seemed almost proud to say they could call no one a friend, proud of the fortitude that loneliness requires. My dad once told me that friends are people you can do nothing with, but these days, people seem to prefer doing nothing by themselves. Are they choosing loneliness because friendship is so much work and real friends are hard to find and make and keep?
---More here http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2006/08/16/fewer_friends